Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 19:27:06 06/05/99
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On June 03, 1999 at 18:47:25, Prakash Das wrote: > Again, I don't think I ever said anything about this being only an Intel >architecture. The platform could be anything. The key part was "uniform", not >what particular architecture. I would like to respond to two points here. First is this one. You *know* that if it is a uniform event, it is going to happen on an Intel machine, considering AMD et. al. as Intel machines, since they are compatible. If they tried to do an event on Mac only, you would see an amazing scream from everyone. Nobody would attend, because very few have access to the Mac, or run on it if they do have access to it. If you told me I'd have to run on the Mac, the only chance I'd have would be to buy a Mac and rewrite my program. No offense to the Mac, but I would pass, since this isn't in line with any of my current goals. If you pick Alpha I have a better chance, since my program is in C and runs under NT, which almost automatically means that it works on the Alpha, but those who don't use NT or can't port to it easily are totally hosed. And what about some goofy minicomputer architecture? You pick something that runs Unix only, what will you call this event? Championship of people who got stuck in college and hate Bill? Nope, the only sane platform would be Intel, since it is the dominant one. Everyone has to cope with that platform or be a little weird. So when I say that a uniform event implies an Intel event, it's only obvious that this is true. >Or should we rather have giant sumo wrestlers beating up ants and calling >themselves world champions? It is easy to make an analogy that make an open hardware event look unfair or silly. Really though, the task here is to assembly a computer system that plays the best chess possible. If the task were to build the world's best wrestler, you'd be silly to build an ant, although it would be within the rules, I assume. This extremely loose hardware/software requirement has resulted in all sorts of different entries, which can only make the field advance. There have been several teams that have built their own hardware in order to get an advantage, and there have been other teams that have tried to link many computers together to get an advantage, and there are teams that have tried to squeeze every ounce of performance out of a particular architecture (at expense of portability) to get an advantage. These advantages aren't unfair, they are a result of creativity, hard work, capitalist brute force, etc. Nothing wrong with any of this. It's not a matter of sumo wrestlers beating up ants. It's a matter of people exercising their own talents to compete with each other given a particular set of rules. Nobody is saying you have to use an ant. Nobody is saying that everyone has the money, time, or imagination to create a sumo wrestler. Everyone who wants to compete in this event has the whole world at their disposal, the amount of its resources you are able to direct into a computer chess playing system is part of the point of the competition. If you can't create something that is truly competitve, you need to either decide to go and hope for the best, decide to go and drink beer, or decide to stay at home and watch the NBA playoffs. I don't know if I've created something that is competitive, so I am going to go the beer route just in case. This is a wide open event. Bring your nuclear powered supercomputer, just remember to bring anti-radiation suits for everyone. bruce
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